At Oxfam’s Oxford St Giles bookshop, Tolkien books - from The Silmarillion to The Return of the King - have taken over the shop windows in a beautiful display. We’ve teamed up with HarperCollins Publishers to run a two-week Tolkien event (9th-23rd October) to celebrate the city’s passion for JRR Tolkien’s books and the strong links which the author had with his home city — and to thank the Tolkien Trust for the generous support they have given to Oxfam’s work.

The Tolkien Trust, established by JRR Tolkien’s four children, has generously supported Oxfam’s work for many years - especially Oxfam’s East Africa Food Crisis response last December. We wanted to celebrate this generosity. When HarperCollins donated a selection of Tolkien books with a retail value in excess of £10,000, we decided the best way to say thank you was to sell them in our shop just down the road from The Eagle and Child. This was of course Tolkien’s favourite pub in Oxford, where he used to meet his friends C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, among others, in a weekly meeting on Thursday evenings called ‘The Inklings‘. It was in these meetings that Tolkien would read aloud parts of The Lord of the Rings, while it was still a work-in-progress, for constructive criticism from his fellow writers - so it seems fitting that the trilogy is coming home to this block.

All the books will be on sale to the public, and proceeds will be used to fund Oxfam’s lifesaving work around the world.

Of course, the Inklings met at the Eagle and Child (sometimes at a different Oxford pub) on Tuesday mornings, not Thursday evenings, and did not read their works in a pub, but (usually) in C.S. Lewis's rooms in Magdalen. Nor is The Lord of the Rings a trilogy.

Well, the window is attractive - and the Companion and Guide prominently displayed!

Only, it seems, out of politeness when replying to others who had misused the term. Otherwise, he commented to Rayner Unwin that trilogy 'is not really accurate' when applied to The Lord of the Rings (Letters, p. 184), and to Houghton Mifflin that 'the book is not of course a "trilogy"' (Letters, p. 221). Christina and I have also run across a similar plea by Tolkien in the Houghton Mifflin archive, that the publisher please not use 'trilogy' in a Lord of the Rings jacket blurb.